Reporting for school duty: Armed guards give parents peace of mind in Lodi

As parents and students gathered outside Washington Elementary School in Lodi for the first day of classes Wednesday, they were greeted by a man with a pistol strapped to his leg.

The man was William Byrnes, a retired Saddle Brook police lieutenant and one of Lodi’s new “school safety officers,” six armed guards recently hired to protect the borough’s elementary school students.

For parents, Byrnes was a welcome addition, especially after the horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings last December, in which 20 students and six adults were gunned down at a Newtown, Conn., school.

“I think it’s great, especially with what’s going on in this country,” Lodi mom Carrie Gould said as she dropped her son off at the school for his first day of second grade. “I feel safer having my kid in school now.”

Starting this school year, armed guards will be stationed at all five of the borough’s elementary schools. They will keep watch when students are arriving and after dismissal, as well as during lunch and gym classes, according to Lodi police Capt. John Scimeca, who is overseeing the new program. During the school day, they will also walk the halls, conduct security checks on doors and windows, escort visitors through the buildings and assist principals with lockdown and fire drills, Scimeca said.

The guards are all recently retired police officers, each with at least 25 years of law enforcement experience. They are all certified in active school shooter response and threat assessments, according to Scimeca.

Lodi, according to Scimeca, is the only school district he is aware of in the state that has armed, retired officers in its elementary schools.

The idea to put security guards in the Lodi elementary schools has been discussed for about two years, and Scimeca said he and Police Chief Vincent Caruso began formulating a written policy for the program last year. But after the Sandy Hook massacre, Scimeca said police felt an added sense of urgency to have the program in place for the 2013-14 school year.

“Here you have our most vulnerable population and … no one’s here protecting them from any dangers from the outside,” Scimeca said.

The Sandy Hook shootings reignited a national debate over gun control, leading to calls for bans on assault rifles and limits on high-capacity magazines. A week after the shootings, the National Rifle Association broke its silence, proposing that armed guards be placed in every school in the nation, following that with a pronouncement that the “only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

The idea was met with derision from some school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians. Governor Christie said that he did not think armed guards would make schools safer unless there was a guard in every classroom, and that having multiple guards in schools would not be “conducive to a positive learning environment.

Others, however, supported the idea: In January, Totowa became the first school district in Passaic and Bergen counties to post active-duty police officers in its elementary schools for the entire school day, and a Monmouth County school district also placed armed officers at its schools shortly after the shootings. In February, the Passaic Valley Regional School Board voted to allow its high school principal, a retired police sergeant, to carry a weapon during the school day.

The furor over gun control seems to have faded, however. Despite an aggressive effort by the White House, Congress failed to pass any gun control legislation earlier this year and the NRA’s call for armed guards appears to have become muted as public attention has shifted to other matters.

“We do support and we have supported a trained, armed presence in schools,” said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. “But that’s also in addition to having other security measures in place.”

Those measures, he said, include pinpointing weaknesses in a school’s surveillance infrastructure and having a secure perimeter around school facilities.

Arulanandam said an NRA-funded school safety task force came out with a report in April that made several recommendations that schools could adopt as they saw fit.

For Lodi parents, armed guards in their children’s school wasn’t a gun control issue — it was about their kids’ safety.

Aydan Agus, a father of two Washington Elementary students, said his children had been scared to go to school after the Sandy Hook shootings. When they heard a guard would be posted at their school, they were happy, he said.

“They feel like, for sure, nothing’s going to happen,” Agus said.

“It helps protect the kids,” said Steve Fong, whose daughter attend Columbus Elementary. “It makes you feel a little more secure when the kids are out here.”

Paul Cell, president of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, said he believed other districts around the state were either exploring the idea of putting retired officers in their schools or planned to do so this school year, but he could not provide specifics.

Although the chiefs’ association would prefer “active, sworn law enforcement officers” working in schools, Cell said they also supported the use of retired officers as long as they work for the local police department and — as in Lodi — that department “exercises control over training, supervision and policy regulation.”

Lodi’s retired officers are only being stationed at the borough’s elementary schools because active-duty police officers already work in the middle and high schools. Although there are five elementary schools in the borough, Scimeca said six officers were hired so there is always someone available to fill in if one of the guards is out sick or on vacation.

The officers’ wages are expected to total about $225,000 annually, which will be paid by the borough instead of the school district, said Scimeca. The officers will only be paid for time they actually work, he said. They will not be paid, for example, if there is a snow day or if they go on vacation, he said.

In addition to the guards, Schools Superintendent Frank Quatrone said the district has instituted a card swipe system that restricts access to the school buildings to employees. The district also plans to enhance its surveillance system by increasing the amount of cameras in each building and linking the video feeds to the police department so officers can see what’s happening at the schools in an emergency situation, Quatrone said.